Police officers are being charged, but verdicts are mixed
Reflects shifting sentiment on law enforcement
A few days before Christmas, a jury in Washington state cleared three Tacoma police officers of criminal charges in the death of Manuel “Manny” Ellis, a 33-year-old Black man who died in police custody in 2020 after pleading that he could not breathe.
The next day, on Dec. 22, a jury in Colorado convicted two paramedics of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died in police custody in 2019 after officers subdued him and medics injected him with the powerful sedative ketamine.
In the three years since the murder of George Floyd, whose death in police custody ignited a national movement against police brutality, prosecutors have charged police and emergency medical workers in a number of high-profile cases.
The result has been a mixed bag of verdicts: convictions, acquittals, and, in one case, a mistrial. Civil rights activists and legal experts say the different outcomes reflect a country still struggling with how to view cases of police use of lethal force and shifting public sentiment on law enforcement and safety.
“Police accountability is still up for debate. Even with actual evidence, even with bodycam footage, we’re still in a place where we cannot be certain that an officer’s conviction for wrongdoing will take place through our judicial system,” Charles Coleman Jr., a civil rights lawyer, former New York City prosecutor, and MSNBC legal analyst, said in an interview in October.
The deaths of Floyd, McClain, Ellis, and Breonna Taylor — all killed in fatal police encounters within a ninemonth span — came to occupy a central place in the racial justice movement and, in some cases, inspired reforms in the cities where they were killed.
In total, 16 police officers and paramedics faced state and federal charges in the four cases, with eight convictions so far, including a former police detective who pleaded guilty to federal charges in Taylor’s case.
But convictions are only one piece of the justice system, reform activists pointed out.
“The algorithm of justice are charges, arrest, conviction, and sentencing,” MiDian Holmes, a community activist in Aurora, Colo., said after the paramedics’ conviction in McClain’s death. She said she is thankful for the three convictions in the case, but “we do not know justice until we see sentencing.”
No organization comprehensively tracks the number of law enforcement prosecutions. But legal experts and those pushing for police reform say prosecutors seem more willing to bring charges against police officers, although juries are not as willing to convict.
“There’s at least a situation in which police are subjected to the same criminal law processes as the rest of us would be,” said Ian Farrell, associate professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
Jurors, however, are often reluctant to second-guess “the split-second decisions of police officers in potentially violent street encounters,” said Philip Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University.
Stinson, whose research includes police misconduct, has built a public database of police officers charged in shootings compiled from media reports.
From 2020 to 2023, 71 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter stemming from an on-duty shooting, compared with 43 officers from 2016 to 2019.